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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29034207">Remembering Him (I may have forgotten)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/KazooBoyTM/pseuds/KazooBoyTM'>KazooBoyTM</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Woven Threads of Time and Tangled Memories [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Dream SMP - Fandom, Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Amnesiac!Karl Jacobs, Angst, Blood and Injury, Dissociation, Gen, Karl Jacobs-centric, Major Character Injury, Memory Loss, Multi, Time Traveler!Karl Jacobs, VERY heavily implied karlnapity, and its not a huge part of the story, somewhat angsty, theres no kissing and stuff but its very heavily implied so i put it as a relationship tag</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 04:36:26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,173</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29034207</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/KazooBoyTM/pseuds/KazooBoyTM</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>A man in a multicolored hoodie wakes up in the middle of nowhere with no memory of who he is. All he has is a pocket watch and the words of a mysterious "Karl." He wonders if he'll meet this Karl again someday.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Alexis | Quackity/Karl Jacobs/Sapnap</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Woven Threads of Time and Tangled Memories [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2130849</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>393</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Remembering Him (I may have forgotten)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This was brought to you by my hatred for how op skeletons were in earlier versions of Minecraft. Jk but here, take this. </p><p>It’s based on the idea of Karl losing his memory and going missing. This is just a oneshot but maybe someday i’ll continue it idk. I have an idea involving karlnapity i could continue with but who knows? Also i wrote this all in the span of like 24 hours</p><p>WARNING FOR: Descriptions of wounds, as for the graphic depiction of violence warning. Also note this takes place inside of the Dream SMP and is about the characters, not the real people.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The man in the multicolored hoodie doesn’t know where he is.</p><p>He knows he awoke in the midst of a thick forest, with strange soil that he’d soon find would crunch beneath his feet and spruce trees reaching high for the soft embrace of the sky. He also knows he awoke with a strange pocket watch in his right hand and a splitting headache.</p><p>He’s not sure if he knows who he is.</p><p>Slowly he rises to his feet and soaks in his surroundings. A flash of orange and white scampers off behind a tree- presumably a fox. Cobblestone protrudes out of the ground in a pile nearby, and a small body of water sits to his left. There’s no signs of how he got here.</p><p>He would probably panic if thinking too hard didn’t cause a sharp pain to coarse through his skull.</p><p>Instead he walks around the area he’d awoke in. He comes across a cluster of bushes with small reddish berries growing from them. His stomach grumbles and something tells him they’re edible. He’s not sure how he knows but he trusts his gut and grabs a fistfull of them and wolfs the sickly sweet fruit down like he hasn’t eaten in weeks- for all he knows he really hasn’t. He doesn’t notice until the last berry passes his lips that the red pooling in his hand was blood and in fact not berry juice as he'd first assumed.</p><p>So they had thorns, huh. He makes a mental note to be careful next time, but at least he found food.</p><p>His headache subsides a bit after mouthfuls of earthy water soothe his sore throat and dry mouth.</p><p>With his head a bit more clear he wonders if he should look for help but no- his brain quickly supplies him the reminder that this forest appears completely untouched. Dammit. So he was on his own for this.</p><p>He could probably figure out how to survive here. He’s got water, a food source, plenty of wood to make tools and shelter, and some little foxes to keep him company. Another fox passes his vision, this time slower than the last. They’re quite cute.</p><p>And with that thought he gets to work.</p><p>By the time night falls he has a rickety shack seated comfortably next to the prickly food source, a furnace, and some torches. Though no bed. Looks like he’d be sleeping on the forest floor tonight. He’s proud of his work and sits down leaning against the crackling furnace.</p><p>The pocket watch from earlier rests in his hoodie and he pulls it out, examining it properly. Something about it seems familiar and important but he’s not sure what. Thinking about the searing void in his memory brings back his headache so he pushes away the thought. He turns the metal over in his hands once more before opening it. It looks like a completely normal pocket watch. The ticking clock tells him it’s around 9pm. If it was wrong he wouldn’t have any way of knowing. </p><p>He decides that it’s quite boring, but that he’ll hold onto it. </p><p>He’s about to shove it back in the pocket of the strange hoodie he wore when one last thing catches his eye. A glint of something engraved he’d neglected to notice before. It looks messy- like someone without much prior experience had carved it into the brassy metal. He sounds the scratchy words out to himself softly.</p><p>
  <em>Don’t forget who you are,</em>
</p><p>Under it reads a name.</p><p>
  <em>Karl</em>
</p><p>Hm, Interesting. Who’s Karl? He searches around the thick cloudy void in his mind for something- anything- on who this Karl could be. All it supplies him with is another unhelpful headache. He sighs and puts the pocket watch away. A mystery for another day it seems. Was Karl the one who gave this to him? Was he close to somebody named Karl? Maybe he’d find this Karl someday, but for right now he should focus on survival.</p><p>He falls asleep to the crackling of a furnace and raindrops pitter-pattering onto his shaky roof, and he dreams of nothing.</p>
<hr/><p>About two months have passed and he’s no closer to finding the answer to any of his questions than he was on the first day. He’d thought of countless more queries since then, yet he found nothing else that gave any clue to where he’d come from.</p><p>He still only had the name Karl.</p><p>Some nights when it was difficult to sleep he’d turn the pocket watch over in his hands just as he’d done that first night and read aloud the messy words to himself, along with the name. Something about reading it was calming and familiar. Sometimes he could almost picture writing those words himself. He imagined what it would be like to be in Karl’s position.</p><p>He often wondered about Karl. He knew nothing about the man beside his name yet he wondered: What was his relation to Karl? Why did Karl give this to him? Why did it feel so important to hang onto? It was easier to wonder who Karl was than to wonder who he was, so he rarely did that. Each time he did he’d end up either frustrated at his inability to remember or with a headache pounding his temples or both. All he can wonder is: what happened to him?</p><p>By now he was pretty well off. He had a decent shelter, a proper bed nestled beside a furnace, he was growing the sweet berries he had found on his first day, a mine, and iron tools. And sometimes a baby fox would wander away from its parents to watch him from a distance. He’d smile at it and tell it about his day, how he slept, whatever was on his mind. And now thinking of possible names for his little fox friend kept his mind occupied.</p><p>He was also growing bolder by the day, venturing out further and further beyond the barrier of torches that keep monsters away from the clearing until he’d begun having to make small shelters to wait out the dangers in if he’d gone out too far to make it home by the time night fell.</p><p>And today he wanted to explore. So he went further.</p><p>And further.</p><p>And further.</p><p>Until by the time night fell and he’d begun setting up a small shelter he came to a startling realization:</p><p>He didn’t know which way was home.</p><p>Shit.</p><p>Deep breath in, deep breath out. Okay. That’s fine. You can deal with that later. Right now you have to get somewhere safe.</p><p>The sky was still morphing from a dusty orange to a deep purple. There was probably enough time to assemble some kind of cover before anything too dangerous appeared. He hadn’t had a proper run-in with creatures at night without some form of protection and he wasn’t looking to have one now.</p><p>It didn’t take long for a small cobblestone structure to appear, and he was crafting a door as the final touch when it happened.</p><p>Something sharped poked him in the abdomen, then he felt warm liquid trickling down his stomach.</p><p>Then he felt pain.</p><p>He gasped and stumbled back, grasping onto a crafting table for refuge. The sound of clanking bones drawing back a bow sounded from behind. He whirled around and knocked a skeleton’s head onto the ground before it could lodge another arrow into him, its body crumbling to dust at his feet.</p><p>Shit.</p><p>He didn’t have to look down to know what happened- and if he did he’d probably vomit. Only a nimrod wouldn’t be able to put together that a skeleton and something piercing his abdomen were probably related.</p><p>Nimrod, huh. Where had he heard that word before?</p><p>He shakes the thought out of his skull before the dull ache at his temples can develop into an ear-splitting problem. And oh yeah- that’s right, he had a very serious wound and for all he knew he could bleed to death out here alone.</p><p>He’s dealt with injuries before. He’d nursed countless scrapes and bruises that his ventures had caused right back to health. Once he even twisted his ankle. But not once had he even come close to a situation such as this. What in the hell is he supposed to do about this? Was he supposed to pull the arrow out or leave it in? Oh god anything he could do would just make it worse.</p><p>Shock slowly eases from his mind and in its place sits a new emotion: panic. Oh god, he really was gonna die out here. Alone. And afraid. Bleeding to death. And-</p><p>Something catches his eye as his pupils dart around the landscape surrounding him. A soft glow previously invisible under the light of day, now illuminated in the night. He leans forward, squinting, he can just barely make out the light of a torch at the edge of a forest encasing the mountain- he hadn’t placed any torches on his way here.</p><p>Alongside panic now sits hope.</p><p>Someone else placed that torch.</p><p>Someone else was out here.</p><p>They could help him.</p><p>He hisses at the pain coursing from his stomach that accompanies his movements as he takes step after step. Slowly and methodically climbing down the mountain. He couldn’t risk any more injury. Especially not now when help was within his grasp.</p><p>Another arrow flew past and embedded itself in the rock just above his head. Shit. He had to hurry.</p><p>The quicker, more frantic movements caused more pain, but it wasn’t completely unbearable. He was certain his hoodie that already contained so many colors was now stained with a new one: red like blood. </p><p>When he finally reached the source of the light, one more trickle of blood made itself known on top of what had already dried. He felt lightheaded- like the energy that he normally had was being drained out of him by the second. And in a way it was.</p><p>Looking beyond the small beacon of light revealed a path of torches leading through the forest. A path of hope. With adrenaline coursing through his veins he ran after it. His entire middle felt numb by the time he burst into a clearing, and it was almost as if he wasn’t in his own body as his eyes scanned over the sight in front of him: buildings in the distance. And a small group of people not far behind.</p><p>With the confirmation that yes- there really were people here who could help him, the weight of the past few minutes finally crashed back down onto him and his knees buckled underneath him. He grasped onto a tree for balance. He could feel how his legs burned and the arrow wound hurt. It hurt worse than it had before. Certainly from running for his life with no care.</p><p>He grasped a hand over his stomach with the other flailing in the air attempting to wave to the group, slowly limping toward them. He wanted to shout- to scream at them that he needed help, but the only noise that forced its way out of his throat was a weak groan of pain as the edges of his vision blurred.</p><p>He could hear laughter emanating from each figure. One moment they were all standing together, and the next thing he knew it had stopped and someone was bolting toward him.</p><p>“Holy shit- holy shit, Karl? Karl where have you been?” Someone was yelling out to him with fear and concern lacing their voice and there that name was again. Karl. Was the Karl he’d once known here?</p><p>He collapsed against someone and a pair of arms held him up. Whoever this was, they were shaking. He forced himself to look up and focus on the figure. They had tanned skin and tufts of dark hair peeking out from under a beanie. He could see the glint of tears forming around their eyes. They brought a trembling hand to cup his face and brushed a thumb over his cheek. “Karl..”</p><p>He wishes he knew why he felt like home.</p><p>The person started to bombard him with questions that didn’t quite reach his ears. He doesn’t think he’d be able to answer them anyways. The sound of ringing was the only thing that reached his mind. Suddenly, he could feel the other pulling back to inspect the wound and gasped. “Holy shit.. Karl what happened to you?” Oh yeah, he was going to bleed to death.</p><p>Why did they keep calling him Karl?</p><p>Panic flashed over the other’s features before he turned his head away to call out what he assumed was a name and the sound of someone running followed. He would probably be panicking too if his head wasn’t spinning and he felt like he’d pass out. “Hey, you’re gonna be okay. I’m here. Sap’s gonna be here soon.” A hand in his hair gently pressed his head against the man’s chest. The soft thump-thump of a beating heart filled his ears, panicked yet warm and comforting.</p><p>He’s not sure how long they stood like that until the shout of someone yelling out that damned name again neared and another pair of arms wrapped around his shoulders from behind, and held on tight. “It’s really you.. We thought you were dead..”</p><p>He knew these people? What happened? Why can’t he remember?</p><p>“Uh, Sapnap? Could use a little help here getting him to a doctor?”</p><p>“Yeah? Oh- oh shit yeah. That’s really bad- uh..” The man- presumably named Sapnap, pulled back from the embrace, and next thing he knew he was being picked up and carried like a bride. The other man trailed beside them down a wooden path hurriedly. “Shit man, you’re light.” He simultaneously felt light as a feather and as though a weight was pressing down on his torso and grounding him to this world. “Where the hell were you..” He doesn’t think he could give an answer if he tried.</p><p>He was dizzy. His head felt heavy. His heart drummed loudly in his ears. Exhausted, he let his head fall back onto Sapnap’s chest. The other- he wasn’t sure what his name was, ran a hand through his dirt covered hair. “Rest, okay? We’ll be there soon.” They talk to him like he knows where ‘there’ is.</p><p>When the dizziness has subsided a bit, he finally takes a glance up at the man carrying him. He has a bandana tied around his forehead and a determinedly worried look woven into his features.</p><p>He decides that both of these men are what he’d describe as beautiful. And being with both of them feels like coming home.</p><p>Maybe he really had known them once. But now they were essentially strangers to his mind as much as he was a stranger to himself.</p><p>Oh. He’s dizzier than before and his body doesn’t feel like his own. He’s exhausted. He just needs to rest his eyes.</p><p>Just for a moment.</p><p>The void of memories consumes his consciousness.</p>
<hr/><p>He’s awake, but he doesn’t want to open his eyes. His entire body aches like nothing he’s ever felt before.</p><p>Someone is running their fingers gently across his scalp. Focusing on the repetitive movement eases the pain a little.</p><p>There’s a conversation happening. He can’t make out the words with his still cloudy brain but he hears the same two voices.</p><p>“...Found this in his pocket.” He tunes in after a few minutes.</p><p>“A pocket watch?” The movement atop his head ceases for a moment upon him tensing up, then returns.</p><p>He forces his eyes to open. The unbearably bright light of the world is the first to greet him.</p><p>The second is the pain he feels as he tries to sit up, and the third is the hand gently coaxing him back into the pillows.</p><p>“Hey bud, i’m happy to see you awake but uh, how about you don’t injure yourself any more right now. Okay?”</p><p>“..I want my watch.”</p><p>The cold familiar metal is set in his right hand after a water bottle is placed in his other. He downs the water and sets the remainder aside to cradle the watch in both hands.</p><p>It looks exactly how it always has and it soothes the remaining tension in his body. He turns it over in his hands and runs a thumb along the circular edge before clicking it open. He whispers out the ever familiar words to himself like he’d done a million times before.</p><p>
  <em>Don’t forget who you are.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Karl</em>
</p><p>“How long have you had that?” The man in the beanie asks. He should probably ask his name soon.</p><p>“I don’t know. I woke up with it.” He can hear the raspy edge in his voice.</p><p>“Woke up with it? Where?” Sapnap chimes in and sits down on the edge of the bed, looking at him quizzically.</p><p>“A forest. With big trees and weird looking dirt.”</p><p>“How in the hell did you end up in a giant taiga?”</p><p>“I don’t know.”</p><p>The room was silent for a moment as the other two processed this. “You.. don’t know?” Sapnap finally breaks the silence. He confirms with a nod.</p><p>“Karl..” He glances down at the messy engraving he’d spent countless hours wondering over. The name he’d repeat to himself on restless nights; hoping that maybe one day he’d be able to meet Karl again.</p><p>Now or never. He may never get this chance again.</p><p>“Who’s Karl?”</p><p>The room was deathly quiet.</p><p>The man in blue chuckled nervously. “..What do you mean ‘Who’s Karl?’”</p><p>“Look.” He hands off the watch into his palm and points to the familiar name. “That name. Who is Karl?”</p><p>The other’s eyes run over the text, then turn their focus back to him, and back to the engraving repeatedly as if he can’t believe the words that just left his mouth. “You..”</p><p>“You’re Karl.” Sapnap supplies an answer. Hurt and worry and confusion stain his face.</p><p>Oh.</p><p>
  <em>Oh.</em>
</p><p>His blood ran cold.</p><p>That explained it.</p><p>He lets out a shaky breath and grabs the watch back with shaking hands- a bit more forcefully than intended, to read over the words one more time.</p><p>
  <em>Don’t forget who you are.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Don’t forget who you are.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <strong>Don’t forget who you are.</strong>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <strong>Karl</strong>
  </em>
</p><p>His vision morphs into splotches of color while tears brim his tired eyes.</p><p>He recalls the restless nights in which he’d held the pocket watch and glossed over its message that had been in vain. It was a message for a man who hadn’t been alive for months: a stranger now inhabiting his body and taking his place.</p><p>Karl may have been who he was once, but was he even really Karl anymore?</p><p>Would Karl ever exist again?</p><p>A sob rips through “Karl’s” body and with it the tears run free. He can sense bodies on either side of him- desperately calling out words of comfort to a dead man. He decides on his answer.</p><p>“No..”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>A small bit of an update: This is now part 1 of a series! I have part 2 posted. It'll mostly be oneshots that somewhat connect but there will also be ones that don't at all and just stand alone</p></blockquote></div></div>
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